What we’d like to see from Twitter’s Upcoming Analytics Product

Twitter’s official analytics product went live with a handful of test users in November, but there is little information out there as to what we’ll actually see when it’s released to the general public. Here is our wishlist of things we’d like to see in Twitter’s analytics when we get our hands on it.
Before we get into our wishlist, this is what we know so far about Twitter Analytics:

Mashable reported mid-November that Twitter Analytics was released to a select group of users, and that the analytics will be free upon release. Mashable reports that users will be able to see:

“…information about which tweets are most successful, which tweets caused people to unfollow, and who the most influential users are that reply and retweet their messages.”

They also grabbed a screenshot of what the dashboard looks like below:

So with that under our belt, we’ll take you down a list of features that would make us drool over Twitter’s analytics product:

Free, forever. Ok, this might be wishful thinking, but we’d love to see this product remain free for all time. Twitter might decide to charge a premium for certain features, but we hope that the basics are open to all users, and don’t cost a thing.

Links clicked. In addition to including retweets, replies and favorites, we’d like to see a column showing how many users clicked on the link included in our tweets. This might step on the toes of some of the URL shortener services like bit.ly, but since Twitter has its own URL shortener already, we don’t think it’s an impossible feat.

Keyword alerts. Again, several third-party developers offer this service, but we’d love to see it integrated into Twitter’s analytics so we could have everything in one place. It would be great to have a tally and email alerts for user-defined keywords mentioned on Twitter.

Interactive timeline. Looking to Google Analytics for its timeline functionality might not be such a bad idea for Twitter Analytics. Being able to focus the timeline on a specific day for more detailed information, or stretch it out over a week or month to view trends would be useful to many Twitter users.

Tweet velocity. This one might be tough, but Twitter uses a special algorithm to determine which topics make it to the Trending Topic top ten – and this includes more than just how often a topic is mentioned. It covers things like volume of tweets now compared to the past, and the influence level of those retweeting or using a certain hashtag. It would be interesting if this could somehow be integrated into Twitter Analytics – for instance, highlighting when a tweet is retweeted by a “power user”.